Open to dispute —

Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way

Open source driver for Intel graphics drops Mir support.

An Intel developer who oversees the company's open source graphics driver has pulled support for Mir, the display server that Canonical is building to replace the X window system.

Chris Wilson of Intel's Open Source Technology Center, steward of the xf86-video-intel open source graphics driver for Linux, wrote on Saturday that "We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream." He attributed this statement to "The Management," but did not say exactly who made the decision.

Intel is a supporter of Wayland, another display server that was rejected by Canonical when founder Mark Shuttleworth decided a new system was needed to power Ubuntu's Unity interface across mobile devices and PCs. Canonical developer Michael Hall criticized Wilson's move on Google+, saying, "There is no reason not to accept a patch to an Xorg video driver just because it supports a competitor to Wayland."

The code in question was "a patch to Intel's Xorg driver so that it can run Xorg sessions on top of a Mir system compositor," Hall wrote. "[I]t's fine if people think that Wayland is the 'right way' forward, but the submitted patches didn't hinder Wayland, nor does rejecting them help Wayland."

We e-mailed Wilson to ask for elaboration on the decision, and we also contacted Canonical to see how the decision affects the company's plans. Neither have responded yet.

Phoronix noted that "Canonical will now need to carry the XMir support out-of-tree from the xf86-video-intel driver." Hall wrote that Canonical "will continue to work on our projects (Ubuntu, Mir/XMir, Unity) and win by having a better product."

UPDATE: Canonical provided us with this statement on Sept. 10: "Canonical contributed XMir support that met all the technical requirements for inclusion in the upstream Intel driver, and we are disappointed that Intel decided to reverse their initial decision to include it for non-technical reasons. Fortunately, Intel customers who use Ubuntu will not see any regressions as we will simply continue to support XMir in the Intel driver as part of Ubuntu. We believe in a healthy eco-system of display servers, including X, Wayland, and Mir and plan to continue to work with upstreams such as Intel to provide the best experience to end users and OEMs."

Promoted Comments

Heck, even Canonical was going to go with Wayland initially. Then, for reasons that are still not clear, they decided to scrap that and basically recreate the Wayland project from scratch. Their rationale for doing so turned out to be full of holes (esp. their technical criticisms), but AFAIK nothing has emerged to fill those holes. People are still scratching their heads over what Mir could offer the Linux world that Wayland doesn't do better. Meanwhile, Wayland was being adopted as the next industry standard, which meant it was already guaranteed support from device and hardware manufacturers as well as all the big Linux software projects and teams. There was a broad consensus that Wayland is the way forward in a post X11 world, across multiple platforms from embedded systems to hot-rod PCs. From the standpoint of pretty much everybody that's not Canonical Mir has no compelling reason to exist and, aside from Ubuntu's mindshare with users, they don't have a reason to dedicate manpower and manhours into supporting it. And Wayland trumps Ubuntu in importance to the Linux ecosystem; the average user might know Ubuntu's name, but everything that isn't "Ubuntu" was going to be powered by Wayland under the hood, so Canonical was really swimming against the riptide on this one.

I'm still using Ubuntu for practical reasons (I just don't have the time to configure Arch from scratch), but their decisions keep annoying me. Maybe it's time to abandon ship and find some time to make the change.

Yeah, Canonical is pissing into the wind on this one. OSS NIH syndrome rearing its ugly head. And here I thought only places like Apple, MS, and Google suffered from NIH.

It's hard for any project to accept single-customer patches like this, to be quite fair. If the changes were used by both the x server for wayland and XMir, it would make more sense. But since they would only be used by XMir, which itself looks to only be used by Canonical (and even then, only Ubuntu proper) then the value of those changes is limited and accepting them would make them Intel's responsibility.

All this decision seems to do is make it harder for the *Buntu derivatives going forward if they don't have industry support for XMir. Distros like Mint and Elementary also spring to mind beyond just those like Xubuntu and the ilk who only who use a different DE and nothing else. This was supposed to be a salve to calm those developers' fears, right?

Jon, if you say that Mark Shuttleworth decided to develop Mir you should give us proof link. As far as I know he's not in charge of the technical decisions behind it. I'm not even sure he has the technical knowledge to make such claims.

Well, he has to sign off on everything and directs the company's strategy.

While Canonical does do a decent job making sure that system integration is done better than most other distros, there's still no compelling use case for Mir over Wayland.

Also, you do not generate goodwill when you introduce your project by bashing the very people to whom you find yourself submitting patches.

I thought that the big 'thing' for Mir was bowing to the inevitable and working with Android graphics drivers; because it Ubuntu's mobile ambitions were being stymied by the fact that most embedded GPU vendors make Nvidia look OSS-friendly and AMD look wildly competent in the course of developing drivers, with Android (often only specific versions) being the only thing that motivates them to even puke up a BSP, much less one that actually works, and Xorg or anything else being more of a punchline than an objective.

That doesn't really clarify Intel's reasons, though, since they have positions all over the place(they've resorted to 'GMA500' rebadged PowerVR cores that are as bad as anything in the mobile SoC space when they really need to shave an Atom's TDP, and then ended up supporting WDDM(badly), Xorg(badly), and Android(haven't heard anything one way or the other); but their in-house design, which they seem hellbent on eventually die-shrinking down into mobile devices, has always been fairly OSS friendly, as well as having Android support.)

Jon, if you say that Mark Shuttleworth decided to develop Mir you should give us proof link. As far as I know he's not in charge of the technical decisions behind it. I'm not even sure he has the technical knowledge to make such claims.

Well, he has to sign off on everything and directs the company's strategy.

That's a stretch on your side. He is the founder of Canonical and the man with the money, but, officially, he's not the CEO. He might be the man with the vision, but Mir is a technical decision. We haven't seen anything with his signature saying that Canonical shall develop Mir.

Where does Jon say that "Mark Shuttleworth decided to develop Mir"? All I see is "...Mark Shuttleworth decided a new system was needed..."

Heck, even Canonical was going to go with Wayland initially. Then, for reasons that are still not clear, they decided to scrap that and basically recreate the Wayland project from scratch. Their rationale for doing so turned out to be full of holes (esp. their technical criticisms), but AFAIK nothing has emerged to fill those holes. People are still scratching their heads over what Mir could offer the Linux world that Wayland doesn't do better. Meanwhile, Wayland was being adopted as the next industry standard, which meant it was already guaranteed support from device and hardware manufacturers as well as all the big Linux software projects and teams. There was a broad consensus that Wayland is the way forward in a post X11 world, across multiple platforms from embedded systems to hot-rod PCs. From the standpoint of pretty much everybody that's not Canonical Mir has no compelling reason to exist and, aside from Ubuntu's mindshare with users, they don't have a reason to dedicate manpower and manhours into supporting it. And Wayland trumps Ubuntu in importance to the Linux ecosystem; the average user might know Ubuntu's name, but everything that isn't "Ubuntu" was going to be powered by Wayland under the hood, so Canonical was really swimming against the riptide on this one.

I thought that the big 'thing' for Mir was bowing to the inevitable and working with Android graphics drivers; because it Ubuntu's mobile ambitions were being stymied by the fact that most embedded GPU vendors make Nvidia look OSS-friendly and AMD look wildly competent in the course of developing drivers, with Android (often only specific versions) being the only thing that motivates them to even puke up a BSP, much less one that actually works, and Xorg or anything else being more of a punchline than an objective.

Their method of making it work with Android graphics drivers was to use a library created by someone else to make Wayland work with the Android graphics drivers.

Roughly 90% of their progress so far has been by copying code developed for Wayland.

The component that lets Mir work with Android userspace graphics blobs, libhybris, was developed by Carsten Munk (aka Stskeeps) who is the lead developer for Mer Project, a non-Android mobile Linux core platform being used by Jolla for their Sailfish OS devices. It was also developed with Wayland in mind, but being focused on bionic<->glibc and EGL translation, it's not really Wayland specific which is why Mir can use it as well.

Canonical just did not up and create the Mir system while insulting every single X.org and Wayland developer; they created Mir after doing absolutely no research on Wayland itself. Within mere hours after Mir's creation the Canonical staff received the mother of all beatdowns from developers who, gasp, had actually bothered to read the Wayland and Weston development pages: conveniently located at http://wayland.freedesktop.org/ Unsurprisingly Canonical was forced to quickly edit their original announcements as well as their own wiki.

What readers here have to understand is that a large number of GNU, Free Software, and OpenSoftware projects had already began plans to move forward on Wayland development. KDE, for example, was moving to Wayland over 4 years ago. As Martin went onto document, Mir created a significant number of new code-level challenges for existing software projects. There is no way that any of those software projects could justify writing, and then supporting, a Mir compatible system for what would ultimately be a single distribution release.

Open Source supporters should be proud of Intel for making this stance. It's the one that needed to be taken. Canonical's only real option, at least going forward, is to directly apologize to all of the developers they flat out insulted; not just remove those insults; and cease Mir development. Will that happen? Not likely, but I won't miss Canonical when they finally go bai bai.

Anyway, I'm somewhat saddened to see people complaining about Canonical's decisions.

Canonical's ideas of innovation and cooperation are apparently, "we do something, and you support it, or your app will look horrible or not work in Ubuntu." AFAICT, people have been more patient/cooperative than necessary with this, which has just led Canonical to undertake bigger and even more obnoxious projects like Unity-the-desktop and Mir.

Foisting your poorly-justified decisions on the community and expecting them to deal with it is not cooperation. "Complaining about their decisions" is not really about their decisions, but their unwillingness to be a good citizen.

I thought the whole point of Linux was choice. If Ubuntu wants to use their own display server, why is this suddenly an issue?

It's not an issue. Nobody else is obligated to help Canonical though. They are entirely free to Do Their Own Thing, others Doing It Too will probably require a compelling argument for them to jump on board, and Canonical has not supplied one.

That's a stretch on your side. He is the founder of Canonical and the man with the money, but, officially, he's not the CEO. He might be the man with the vision, but Mir is a technical decision. We haven't seen anything with his signature saying that Canonical shall develop Mir.

Pedantry. Shuttleworth is the boss of Canonical and Ubuntu. When they stake out a position, we can reasonably assume that Shuttleworth is in on it unless he explicitly says otherwise. Same way that "Steve Jobs says" and "Apple says" were formerly synonymous.

So Canonical post the patch. Does that mean they're going to support it going forward? No, of course not. In fact they have a history of not supporting stuff. So Intel have absolutely made the right decision.

Jon, if you say that Mark Shuttleworth decided to develop Mir you should give us proof link. As far as I know he's not in charge of the technical decisions behind it. I'm not even sure he has the technical knowledge to make such claims.

Well, he has to sign off on everything and directs the company's strategy.

That's a stretch on your side. He is the founder of Canonical and the man with the money, but, officially, he's not the CEO. He might be the man with the vision, but Mir is a technical decision. We haven't seen anything with his signature saying that Canonical shall develop Mir.

I thought the whole point of Linux was choice. If Ubuntu wants to use their own display server, why is this suddenly an issue?

-kap

There's no issue or contradiction here. Free Software is about choice as you say, and that includes the freedom to make poor choices. The community is also free to point and laugh (or cry) as we see fit.

The egcs project was a fork of gcc back when gcc development was making choices the egcs folks disagreed with. Eventually egcs surpassed gcc and the gcc and egcs teams merged their branches. (I might have some details wrong there, I didn't search to confirm my memories.)

In this case we have three competing virtual branches: no new display driver (soldier on with just X), Wayland and Mir. All three will compete as long as anyone is willing to use and maintain them. If one of them emerges as clearly superior the other two have the option to abandon or merge their project.

These discussions about whether such choices are good or not are necessary for the community to communicate their needs and preferences and work out which options best suit everyone. In this thread the dominant voice is "Mir is unnecessary and therefore wasteful. Poor show, Canonical."

It might be helpful to think of this discussion as similar to armchair quarterbacks discussing coaching and team management decisions. One difference being that a relatively large portion of the Ars folks are actually involved in some way in the things being discussed, or have some other qualification.

I believe Canonical's desire for copyright assignment to Canonical for anyone doing work on Mir is a core part of this. Copyright assignment allows them to sell a closed (non-GPL) version of Mir as a cell phone platform. The community around Wayland is refusing to participate in this scheme and are instead opting for a true open source solution. So the split was done for business purposes, not technical ones.

I'm really of two minds about Ubuntu... On the one hand I acknowledge their work for an easier-to-use Linux distribution, on the other hand they aren't nice players in the world of opensource. The way they spread horrible FUD about Wayland when Mir was announced for the first time was scandalous, even though they retracted quickly.

At some point I thought that maybe, in order to move toward a better unification of the general-purpose Linux distributions, it was necessary for someone to make hard choices. Now... not so sure. How many times did they reject work from the community to build their own thing...

Anyway, I'm somewhat saddened to see people complaining about Canonical's decisions. It makes me feel like the Intel and Red Hat developers are our overlords, and everyone who disagrees with them should be burnt at the stake. There is only one right way and that is the way of wayland.

The interesting part in this whole display server fiasco is that the people who are most vocal against Canonical's decisions are the ones who are really insignificant in the eyes of Intel and Red Hat. If it was to RH they'd rather see us use Fedora and RHEL. If somebody has done that, he or she will know why Mac osx rules in science nowadays.

Today is a sad, sad day for us all.

There are a lot of OSS projects that have chose wayland as the new standard and replacement for Xorg. Just off the top of my head is KDE, QT, and GNOME. Mir is only an Ubuntu thing just like Unity..

I thought that the big 'thing' for Mir was bowing to the inevitable and working with Android graphics drivers; because it Ubuntu's mobile ambitions were being stymied by the fact that most embedded GPU vendors make Nvidia look OSS-friendly and AMD look wildly competent in the course of developing drivers, with Android (often only specific versions) being the only thing that motivates them to even puke up a BSP, much less one that actually works, and Xorg or anything else being more of a punchline than an objective.

Their method of making it work with Android graphics drivers was to use a library created by someone else to make Wayland work with the Android graphics drivers.

Roughly 90% of their progress so far has been by copying code developed for Wayland.

I didn't know that. Now this 'Mir' makes far less sense than I thought it did(and I wasn't exactly optimistic, after the...special...things they did with 'Unity'). If it was The Only Way to get support on devices that are only ever going to get Android binary blobs, it would be an unfortunate-but-proximately-logical move. Outside of that, though, it's just baffling.

I thought that the big 'thing' for Mir was bowing to the inevitable and working with Android graphics drivers; because it Ubuntu's mobile ambitions were being stymied by the fact that most embedded GPU vendors

Mir compatibility layer is done with libhybris. Which is library developed by Jolla for Wayland.An important information that is absent from your link.

I'm really of two minds about Ubuntu... On the one hand I acknowledge their work for an easier-to-use Linux distribution, on the other hand they aren't nice players in the world of opensource. The way they spread horrible FUD about Wayland when Mir was announced for the first time was scandalous, even though they retracted quickly.

At some point I thought that maybe, in order to move toward a better unification of the general-purpose Linux distributions, it was necessary for someone to make hard choices. Now... not so sure. How many times did they reject work from the community to build their own thing...

It seems to me that Ubuntu garnered the most praise and goodwill from new users and techies back when it was just a Really Good Gnome Distro. They customized a few things here and there, they did a lot of the underlying work to make a usable and friendly Debian system out-of-the-box, but it was still basically the Gnome experience with the rough Linuxy edges smoothed out. I remember local public radio talkshows recommending Ubuntu to non-techie users back in the 7-8.x days for old computers or people who had chronic virus troubles. Once they started up with Unity, though, it kind of lost that new-user friendliness as well as the broad Linux community praise/support. Their big efforts to Do Their Own Thing instead of just do the existing things really well marked a kind of turning point in the attitudes of the community towards Canonical as well as Canonical's attitude towards the community. That's just my perspective.

I thought that the big 'thing' for Mir was bowing to the inevitable and working with Android graphics drivers; because it Ubuntu's mobile ambitions were being stymied by the fact that most embedded GPU vendors make Nvidia look OSS-friendly and AMD look wildly competent in the course of developing drivers, with Android (often only specific versions) being the only thing that motivates them to even puke up a BSP, much less one that actually works, and Xorg or anything else being more of a punchline than an objective.

Wayland works with Android drivers and the Jolla Mobile is proof of that

Why? that decision makes no sense. Ubuntu is the most popular linux distro

That may be true, at least for the general public. But they are also known for several technical decisions that many find questionable. Rejecting the community project Wayland for in-house Mir is the latest example. That may encourage others to be careful dealing with Ubuntu.